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Notes -
Rampant speculative thoughtstream:
It becomes 'old' money when the sources of a family's wealth are all but inextricably woven into the fabric of the society in which said family operates, in such a way that their wealth will never disappear without A) an actual revolution or B) the collapse of said society.
This definition makes it easy to declare Saudi money 'old' money despite being relatively young since their oil wealth is the entire backbone of their respective nations.
The Walton Family is now old money insofar as we can't imagine an American Nation that doesn't have a Wal-mart in every single town, and any event that led to Wal-Mart collapsing would probably spell massive doom for huge swaths of the country too. The Gates family may or may not be old money by this definition. Microsoft is woven into the fabric, but I don't think that constitutes most of his wealth and I'm not sure how he has the rest of his money squirreled away.
Elon Musk's fortune is tied directly to the fates of SpaceX, Tesla, now Twitter, and probably a few other companies, He is exposed to risks directly related to the fates of those companies that could succeed or fail irrespective of how well the U.S. as a whole does. That's new money, it isn't 'locked in' yet although it trends that way. One can imagine a mere twenty years in the future where SpaceX is the equivalent of the railroad companies of old, being our primary method of transport into space, Tesla is the largest car manufacturer, and Twitter remains the most-used forum for screaming at your political opponents, and thus Musks descendants enjoy a multi-trillion dollar fortune that is inextricably tied to the U.S. economy. With a bit more diversification, then they would be 'old money' by then.
I think Taleb makes a point about this as well. "Old money" gets insulated from risk by pure attrition. The families that don't store money in incredibly safe places, or that don't properly distribute their risk by effective diversification will ultimately get wiped out, sooner or later, leaving behind the families that are, by definition, good at spreading risk around and thus having a finger in almost every pie.
This definition does imply that any fabulously wealthy individual can become 'old money' regardless of how they earned their wealth simply by hiring a competent financial advisor who puts their money into a carefully chosen portfolio that is unlikely to ever be wiped out absent a civilizational crash.
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